Tapping In The Night
by Newtinmpls
Summary: Inspired by the way Edgar Allen Poe writes. Tallis wakes from a pretty dream to a sound that turns out to be a harbinger of unpleasantness. Foryn Gilnith/OC. Rated M for graphic wounds.


_Same song second verse: Everybody belongs to Bethesda! No, I'm not getting paid, I'm just obsessed. _

_Got this image in my head and had to write it to get rid of it. _

_Enjoy!_

Tallis was in the middle of a very pleasantly chaotic dream. Something about packs of talking nix hounds and giant dragonflies that kept telling her they were big enough to offer her a ride. There was a tapping sound in the background.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The tapping didn't go with any of the dream imagery, and as soon as she realized that, Tallis also realized that she was losing hold of the dream. The nix hounds were fading, the dragonflies whispering warnings as they circled higher and higher overhead.

Tap, tap. Tap, tap.

The tapping was coming faster now. It seemed louder, somehow. She opened her eyes, looking up at the barely visible starlit darkness that was the ceiling of her bedroom. To her right, night breezes faintly stirred the gauzy hangings between the pillared area that looked down upon the inner courtyard. She could still hear the tapping. But it wasn't tapping, it was dripping.

Drip, drip, drip.

"Odin?" Usually he slept at the foot of her bed, but it was dark enough that she couldn't see for sure. As she waited for a response, she realized that she could smell blood.

Drip, drip, drip.

The faintest of whines came from directly beneath her. Odin, all two hundred odd pounds of giant dog of him, was under her bed. He could barely fit there any more, and only bothered to try when something was very very frightening. Which was pretty much never.

Cold ran up her spine and the hairs on her arms stood on end.

She reached under her pillow and slowly drew out a small triangular throwing blade. Under her breath she softly whispered a summons, and within seconds a firefly darted into the room, circling over her head. Then another and another.

She scooted slowly, lowering her feet to the ground, and they encountered something chill. She froze, but even that much contact was enough to tell her that it had been warm and was cooling. Part of it was sticky.

Drip, drip, drip.

Her back was to the courtyard now. Her wardrobe was to her far left. By the flickering glow of the gathering fireflies, she could see it looked untouched. The dripping was coming from the last piece of furniture in the mostly empty room. A high backed chair she'd moved up some months ago from the dining area, and put, intending it to be only for a little bit, right next to her door. She'd intended to attempt some magical modification of the trim of the top of the door, but hadn't gotten it done yet.

At least twice a day Arenea would complain that besides wrecking the symmetry of the dinner hall, the chair did not go with the décor of this room. What little there was of it.

Drip, drip, drip.

The chair was occupied. The dripping was coming from that direction. All the breath went out of her, and she was up, bare feet leaving bloody tracks from the thing she'd almost stepped on by her bed.

She knew it was Foryn Gilneth long before she recognized him. Dark patterned clothing, so that even unconscious he was barely visible. Strange looking weapons in both hands, and in the slowly increasing light of the gathering lightning bugs, she could catch a glint of silver on the twisted edges. Where they weren't stained with something that looked darker and thicker than blood. The guards were complicated enough that his hands were inserted into them, and not just holding them, which explained why they hadn't dropped into the growing pool of blood on the floor.

He was sitting tilted to her left, away from the door, and his right arm was hanging limp. That was where the dripping was coming from. At first she thought that he had some kind of spiky guard protecting his upper arm, but she blinked and suddenly she could see what was really going on. Pale spikes of twisted bone protruded from skin and leather. What was left of the leather that had once been part of a sleeve or amour, was now just shreds holding chunks of muscles, torn and still dripping.

Drip, drip, drip.

Sounds of scrabbling paws on the floor told her that Odin was making his way out from under the bed. That told her that whatever had happened, the bad guys were now dead or gone, which was good, because she really didn't have time to worry about them.

She scrambled to her wardrobe, slipping a bit on the blood on the floor. Was all of it his blood? No time to worry about that. She grabbed her pack dumping it unceremoniously open, aiming for the bottom of the wardrobe, but scattering things over the floor as well. Two jars; Arenea's salve, the salve she had spent so much time and money and work making and Tallis had better appreciate the effort that went into this, and they had better work. Please work, Tallis begged in her mind, she'd be happy to pay for the lab supplies and the cost of the jars and anything else Arenea might have in mind if only they would just stop the bleeding.

She scrambled through the obstacle course of supplies that she'd just created for herself, by the nine, that was a fool move, think ahead more, wasn't that the complaint of her very first instructor? She tried to unscrew the jar as she moved to him, but at first it wasn't coming, oh Azura, he was going to die just because she was clumsy, and then it opened and she'd turned it so hard that the top of the jar spun off and away and she didn't care. She poured the syrupy, gelatinous, clumpy, stuff over what was left of Foryn's right arm, and gagged when the smell of it combined with the smell of so much blood. Trying not to breathe too deeply she scraped out the last of it to make sure the whole horrible wound was covered.

He moved then, and made some kind of noise that went right through her. He still wasn't conscious, and there was enough light now that she could see the other dark stain, not bleeding, not dripping, but the patterns in his clothing were obscured by the blood that had soaked into it.

She looked at the floor again and the pool of blood was bigger than she'd thought, and how much was too much? He was tall, even for a dunmer, but you could only lose so much blood, but he was still alive now and she was going to keep him that way.

"Hey," She said, or tried to say, and her voice was kind of scratchy and scared sounding and that should have made him frown or mock her, but he was so still against the back of the chair. "I'm going to use my outlander magic on you, and if you don't tell me not to, I'm taking that as a yes."

There was no answer, there was nothing, of course there was nothing, he was unconscious at the very least, she hadn't thought to check for a head wound, but there was no time for that now. She put her left hand to the medallion around her neck, and carefully touched his neck with her right hand. Skin contact was always best when starting healing types of magics. She could feel his pulse under her fingertips, rapid and stuttering.

She clenched her left fist over the medallion, where the coils of magic she'd spent hours preparing slept, waiting for her call. She spoke a single soft word.

The spell woke, eager and searching, visible to her eyes as tendrils of every shade of green and gold, searching him, covering him in a rapidly growing, thickening network. He slumped forward, and carefully she eased him off the chair, onto the floor, it didn't matter about the blood now. The glow, the network sank into him, and it was as if his skin, where she could see skin, and his clothing where that was visible, began to thicken and blur. She let go the breath she was holding. It was working.

She slumped down next to where the magic was still coiling through him, staring vaguely at the rest of the room; at her bed which she was now facing, at Odin now sniffing at the thing she'd stepped on. He batted it with a paw and it turned a little. It was a head.

It was the head of a pasty grey skinned creature with no facial features other than a distorted thing that was some kind of trunk or tendril. And the breath she'd been letting out caught in her throat because she had seen one before.

Her first reaction was to try to scoot away from it, but her back was to the wall, and she wasn't going anywhere. It's dead, she told herself, but all that came out was a whimper, and she put a fist to her mouth to prevent it from growing to a scream. It's dead, it's dead, its dead she repeated in her head, staring intently at it, watching for any movement. But there was nothing. It was dead.

She looked at where Foryin's body lay, caught in a healing spell that was going to take at least six days. Then back to the creature. Well Arenea could lecture her all she liked on wards and protection, but clearly there wasn't enough, and if another one of those things came here, they wouldn't have any trouble at all chopping that chrysalis into small bits. She needed help to keep him safe. She needed really powerful help and she needed it right away.


End file.
